Technological transparency: appellate court and media relations after Bush v. Gore.

• Date: 22 September 2007
• Author: Waters, Robert Craig
• Published date: 22 September 2007
• Author: Waters, Robert Craig

1. INTRODUCTION: THE BIG CASE

   The start of the broadcast was only minutes away, and for the next hour it would become the most watched television news event since the bizarre night of Florida's botched presidential election a month earlier. An entire world was scrutinizing little Tallahassee, Florida's capital city. The tension was palpable. I arrived early December 7, 2000, anxious to make sure that the Florida Supreme Court's all-important satellite uplink was working properly. This was the vital connection that would enable a world-wide audience to see and hear an hour-long oral argument broadcast from a courtroom that one commentator called "an elegant television studio." (1) At the time, such a description easily could have been derisive, and even today it would at least spark healthy debate among appellate court officials nationwide. There are a number who still believe courts and cameras should seldom mix. Not in Florida.

   In fact, the concept of an elegant television studio probably could have been applied to no other appellate court in 2000--an ironic coincidence in light of the historic events then unfolding in the Sunshine State. And it was my responsibility to make sure that the broadcasts did not fail at such a crucial time, since no other television cameras would be permitted in the building that day. Instead, the cameras permanently built into the courtroom architecture were the sole source of oral-argument video. They also were unique in a sense little recognized in 2000: These cameras were completely controlled by the Court's own Office of Public Information and, in just minutes, would feed live video to all of the world's major news networks. This in itself was an historic event, but one greatly overshadowed by the larger issue--the Presidency.

   The top of the hour was quickly approaching--10:00 a.m., when arguments would begin. After assuring myself that a good test pattern was now flowing around the globe from our satellite transponder, I helped escort the twenty-eight credentialed reporters to their reserved seats in the courtroom. This was part of my duty as the public information officer for the Court--its spokesman and communications director. Going down my checklist, I went back to my computer to make sure the Court's Website--our on-line repository of all filings, orders, and decisions in the election cases--was working properly and could be quickly updated if the Justices issued any rulings that day. Satisfied that it was so, I went on to make sure that the three still photographers chosen pursuant to court order were in place in the areas assigned them as the courtroom "pool."(2) Later I joined the Clerk of Court in briefing the attorneys and parties about how post-argument press interviews would be held outside the building shortly after 11:00 a.m.

   This last item would be among the day's hardest assignments, and it mattered more than most people thought. Jettisoning the key political and legal players from the courtroom and into an uncontrolled mob could be interpreted as a lack of control, reflecting on the Court itself. Any kind of physical handoff at the front doors had proven difficult since Election Day, whether it was attorneys walking out into the crowd or my own task of announcing decisions from the front steps. We on the Court staff only controlled what happened inside. But when our doors swung out, they opened to nothing resembling the neighborly southern city of some 150,000 residents where I had worked since graduating from law school in 1986.

   The scene in the public areas outside the building was near chaos, so much so that the Supreme Court Marshal had locked down the entire building weeks earlier. Huge crowds of reporters, demonstrators, and sightseers roamed from the stanchions on the courthouse steps across Duval Street and up the hill toward Florida's twenty-two story Capitol. If a riot had broken out, law enforcement never would have been able to contain it. Incidents of near violence already had occurred, the most notorious over a coveted parking spot for a satellite truck immediately across the street from the Florida Supreme Court building at the Capitol's curb. (3) When the truck that first claimed the space had gone to refuel, its crew left a single reporter to stand in that spot to "save" it. Another satellite truck driver quickly saw the space and began inching toward the reporter, demanding that she move. When she did not, he used his massive truck to knock her to the asphalt--and was promptly arrested by law enforcement officers guarding the Supreme Court building. They had witnessed the entire episode.

   For police, crowd control was complicated by the fact that the City of Tallahassee continued to leave two lanes of automobile traffic open on Duval Street between the Court and the Capitol. Elaborate landscaping on the series of terraces ascending up the hill from the street to the Capitol was completely hidden--some of it trampled--beneath a new tent city erected hastily by media that had descended on Tallahassee in the days after the election. This was choice real estate at the time: Television demanded a camera angle that showed the Florida Supreme Court building in the background, its Jeffersonian dome rising above satellite-truck dishes, and waving protest signs on the street below. These tents became the portable studios from which broadcasters fed news to a national and international audience.

   I knew that the press interviews outside the building would invite disruption. As the days passed after the election, the crowds only grew larger and more boisterous. Reporters vied for the best positions to question attorneys representing the Republican and Democratic parties and their candidates. Security dictated that this could not be done in the more controlled environment inside our building, nor could it be done inside any other nearby building. Space was too limited for the hundreds of reporters on scene, and it was virtually impossible to separate actual journalists from mere spectators. Worse still, our Press Room could handle no more than a dozen reporters, even if all of them stood in a scrum.

   So, all announcements to and interviews with reporters had to be done outdoors on the courthouse steps. This proved to be great drama for television, because it brought to mind the centuries-old practice of court staff making official public statements and conducting business from their front steps. But in late 2000, it had become a matter of sheer necessity. There had been no time to plan for alternate, and more secure, venues. The election dispute had been a complete surprise. And today we tend to forget: There still were ten months remaining before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would change everything--including court security in high-profile cases. (4)

   So, the great contrast of the day was the difference between inside and outside. On instructions from Chief Justice Charles T. Wells, strict order would be enforced in the courtroom as the attorneys and the Justices delved through arguments and rebuttals, questions and answers about Vice President Gore's request to recount disputed votes. The few dozen people who stepped in line early enough to obtain unreserved courtroom seating would be respectfully quiet. Everything that could be kept inside would be kept inside, where tight control was still possible. The doors would only open to some 150 people who would watch the proceedings and then would be promptly escorted back outside. The doors would close and lock behind them. No matter what raged outside, the interior of the Court building was unusually silent as judicial staff labored with their memoranda and their recommendations.

   Even the distribution of court filings, orders, and opinions had largely moved outside the doors and into the virtual realm, distributed from the Court's existing website. One veteran Florida reporter, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucy Morgan, called our decision to post every filing "inspired." (5) I already had created a special Presidential Election Cases website on Friday, November 11, 2000, long before the first filings arrived. So, from the very start no one needed to come inside the building to obtain paper copies of documents that were public record--and therefore had to be produced on demand--under Florida's broad Sunshine Laws. Had we not used electronic distribution, our staff and our photocopying machinery soon would have been overwhelmed--a point made vivid when our only high-speed copying machine failed early in the controversy.

   At first this looked like an easy solution, because the Court had pioneered using the Web as a court communications tool starting in 1994. Our staff thus had more Internet experience than most other courts, and our equipment could handle about three and a half million hits per day, which was considered at the time to be an extravagant number for a court. On Election Day, the Court's website only received about two thousand hits. This number almost certainly was suppressed by the obvious distractions of November 7, but a few thousand hits a day was the norm.

   Less than two weeks later, demand rocketed far past capacity, into the tens of millions. Our website began to falter, and our Information Systems department was forced to find a better solution. It did so by purchasing additional Internet capacity from a company in the relatively new industry of "content delivery networks," which can reroute Web traffic automatically from a beleaguered site to other backup servers around the nation and the globe. In essence, these networks create a large number of duplicate websites in diverse locations and reroute users to those that they can reach most quickly. This had the added benefit of moving Web traffic away from the main Tallahassee Internet hub, which itself was becoming snarled, much as cell-phone service in town became less reliable during the controversy.

   With this...